Page 26 of Betrayed Auctioned Mate

Ado snarls, his jaws snapping shut around the man’s throat with lethal precision. The fight goes out of the stranger instantly, his body going limp beneath Ado's mass. It’s over.

I watch the man I have dreamed about for years as he rips out the throat of one of the phantoms of my past. I see two halves of my life collide headlong before my eyes.

Ado doesn’t move for a moment, his wolf form looming over the lifeless body, teeth still bared in a final warning. Blood drips from his snout.

Then, slowly, he steps back. His eyes never leave the fallen man, as if waiting for some trick, some last-ditch attack that never comes.

I breathe out. The adrenaline drips out of me like the last dregs of rainwater in a gutter. My side aches where I was kicked, and the cut along my cheekbone stings in the cold air, but it’s nothing compared to the hard, heavy feeling in my stomach.

I stare at the dead man. It’s a strange mixture of relief and horror. He’s dead. One of them is dead.

The woods are silent around us; the only sound is the faint whistle of the wind through the reeds at the edge of the water. I don’t know how long we sit there, Ado and I, a few feet apart, both of us in wolf form, ensconced by the stillness of the lake. There’s nothing to say. There’s nothing we could say if we wanted to.

After what could have been an eternity, Ado pads over to me. His steps are careful and deliberate. He lowers his snoutand licks my face gently, his tongue brushing over the cut on my cheek. It’s a simple gesture, but it soothes something deep inside me. I close my eyes, leaning into him and rubbing my head against his. I allow the warmth of his presence to chase away my lingering fear.

We shift back together, our bodies returning to human form in the same instant. The world feels colder, more jagged, without the protective layer of fur and the hum of wolf consciousness, but Ado is still there, close beside me.

He reaches into his pack, pulling out a small first-aid kit. His hands are steady as he cleans the wound on my face. The roughness of the butterfly bandage startles me compared with the gentle way he applies it. In the soft press of his fingers, I find a portal to a future where I don’t have to be alone.

I watch his movements in silence. He’s focused, determined, like this small task is the only thing grounding him right now.

Maybe this will prove to him that he was right in his own mind. He followed me—I asked him not to do that. But if he hadn’t come, I think, I’d probably be dead by now.

When he finishes, we sit together in the dirt, our backs against the rough bark of a nearby tree. Opposite us, the corpse of the criminal cools on the ground. The lake glistens faintly in the pale light in my peripheral vision, but everything is muted. Distant.

One of them is dead. One of the men who kept me captive, who haunted my nightmares for years, is finally gone. The truth of it won’t stop reverberating inside me. He must have taken other mercenary work after the Bloodtooths dissolved, drifting into the criminal underworld like the rest of them inevitably did. But now, he’s just a body on the forest floor.

A strange sense of peace settles over me. I think about leaning my head on Ado’s shoulder like I did on our stakeout, not far upriver from here. But I don’t. I can’t. If I touch him any more, I’ll come apart.

I glance at him. He’s staring out at the water, his expression unreadable, but I can feel the tension in him, the protectiveness that’s always been there, even when we were at odds. He saved me today. He saved me from the past, from the darkness that tried to pull me under.

I know I’m not ready to face whatever this means for us. So I echo his quiet until Ado texts the team to pick us up.

Chapter 14 - Ado

A week passes, and I burn alive. I have Keira to thank for that, but I say nothing, and she says nothing, and I think of her every waking moment—and when I’m asleep, I dream of her. It becomes my only pastime.

She wakes me in the night with her soft hands on my face, on my chest. I reach out for her in the darkness and then tumble out of bed. I stumble through my everyday work at the pack center—training our teammates, working this job, sitting in meetings—like a zombie. I feel like a madman most of the time.

Seeing her transformed and halfway to the ground, cowering as thatthingswung his foot toward her, switched something inside of me. Now, I feel it every day.

I become almost mute again overnight. The days of my uncharacteristic interruptions in meetings are decisively over. At one point, Rafael passes me in the hallway and asks me if I could check the time for him on my phone—his is dead, and of course, he doesn’t wear a watch—and I don’t even slow down, just walk right past, not an ounce of capacity within me for conversation. He asks what my problem is to my retreating back. I only have enough energy to feel slightly bad about it.

Aris narrows his eyes whenever he sees me. I know the others are speaking about me behind my back. I don’t care. I can’t care. If I try to care, I know in the end, I’ll run to Keira’s room in the middle of the night and beg her on my knees to let me in. She doesn’t need that. She doesn’t deserve it.

I hardly eat. I subsist almost solely on coffee. Sleep is worse, I tell myself. When I sleep, she is there.

She is there in meetings, too, which makes them torturous. I would consider skipping out if I had ever skippedanything for the pack before in my life, but I haven’t, and so I won’t. I still won’t meet her eyes as we pass each other on our way into the meeting room.

Everyone seems keyed up. Byron, Olivia, and Keira hunch over a laptop at the far end of the table, murmuring in urgent tones. The rest of the team is spread out, waiting, the usual banter muted by the seriousness of the situation.

Something has happened.

Aris calls the meeting to order, and the room falls silent. Byron looks up, glancing at Olivia, who nods slightly, prompting him to speak.

“We’ve been monitoring the Dark Web, tracking activity related to the auction ring,” Byron begins. He drums the fingers of one hand on the tabletop rhythmically, back and forth. “Olivia and Keira have been helping me sift through the chatter. There’s been an uptick in communication over the last few days—something big is happening.”

Keira straightens in her seat, her eyes still fixed on the screen. Even from across the table, I feel her intensity as if I’m sitting too close to a campfire. It’s like sunburn. She’s in her element, and all I can do is watch her. Her fingers move fast across the keys as she pulls something up. Her eyes raise to the rest of the room, and she could be a statue; she could be made of stone.

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